We all know women have a secret: what they do to get pregnant. Do they swallow on the sly a magic root we know nothing about? Do they hoard their farts, inflate their bellies and thus create a child inside themselves? All us males are obsessed with procreation, because however much we bluster on our weekend binges, the females sit in the driving seat. If we could crack the secret behind pregnancy, the power they exert over us would evaporate. Can’t you tidy the cave? You’ve pissed up the wrong tree! The meat was tough again! They treat us like dummies, and on the pretext that they have to suckle their babes they dispatch us to get rid of the rubbish and hunt wild animals, which means we often return to the cave missing a companion or short of a limb. But there’s no way we can find out how the buggers do it.
The day before his head was smashed in, Lackland announced he’d found out their big secret: females get pregnant thanks to our white wee-wee. Of course, this is pure idiocy, and apart from Athelstan and Rufus, who are the most credulous of men, none of us gave it a second thought. I mean, if male wee-wee is what gets women pregnant … the goats and hens in the corral would also be bringing kids into the world! Those poor chaps are so simple-minded!
Even though I don’t think the women’s secret is connected to the homicides, I decided to have a word with Matilda because all this is making me feel uneasy. I told her my doubts and she immediately reassured me.
“Mycroft, don’t get your knickers in a twist, I beg you.”
“It’s just that you don’t seem scared of the psychopath in the cave. At the very least, it’s a little odd …”
“So you want to be the next to appear one morning with his head smashed in, do you?” she asked, picking up a rock.
“Of course I don’t … But if I don’t find the guilty party, they’re going to immolate me at the crack of dawn. You know how pernickety old Ethelred is …”
“Sit down and listen to me, then,” she said with a sigh. “This is what you must tell Ethelred and his band of rogues.”
As Matilda isn’t short of spunk and is more than able to send an adult male flying from one end of the cave to another, I sat obediently by her side and listened to her most rational explanations. Given her excellent aim when sling-hunting bats, I found her arguments entirely persuasive. I immediately went to see Ethelred to tell him a second time that I’d solved the case.
“Beowulf, Lackland and Athelstan were punished by the gods because they discovered something they weren’t supposed to know,” I affirmed smugly.
“And what might that be?” asked Ethelred offhandedly.
“The women’s secret. The child thing …”
“Oh …!” Ethelred scratched his private parts with his nails and out jumped a couple of fleas. “And who the fuck might these gods be?”
“Gods are superior beings who rule the universe,” I answered, making it up as I went along. “They are eternal, almighty and immortal. From up in the sky where they live, they see all and know all.”
“How do you know?” he enquired, looking at me like a dead fish.
“I had a vision in my dreams. I was told that if we stop trying to find out what women do to get with child there will be no more deaths.”
“What good news!” exclaimed Ethelred, squashing another flea. “Case closed! Now let’s dine. I’m so hungry I could eat a diplodocus!”
And added, with a grin, winking his only eye at me, “If they weren’t extinct, I mean …”
I can’t complain. Today I’ve solved three murders and in one fell swoop invented prophecies, gods and oneiromancy. And saved my own skin into the bargain. The only thing worrying me now is that henceforth everybody will be badgering me to interpret their dreams and will have the cheek to want me to do it for nothing. I can see it now: “I’m having erotic dreams about my mother or dream of killing my father.” Or, “Yesterday I dreamt Cnut’s menhir was bigger than mine …” You know, perhaps I should consider inventing psychoanalysis. It’s not as if I have anything better to do.
The Son-in-Law
The mossos came this morning. I’d been expecting them for days.
When I opened the door, they were still out of breath. That’s nothing unusual. Visitors all get to my attic flat on the seventh floor on their last legs: there’s no lift. The stairs are steep and they’re an effort to climb, and instead of taking it calmly, like Carmeta and me, they must have pelted up like lunatics. I reckon their uniforms will have set the neighbours’ tongues wagging; there are a number of pensioners with nothing better to do than look through their spyholes at my staircase. I only hope the mossos don’t decide to question them, because my neighbours love to stir things. In any case, I don’t think they suspect any funny business.
There was a man and a woman, nice and polite they were, and she was much younger. My hair was tangled, I wasn’t made up and was wearing the horrible sky-blue polyester bathrobe and granny slippers I’d taken the precaution of buying a few days ago at one of the stalls in the Ninot market. The bathrobe is very similar to the one worn by Conxita, the eighty-year-old on the second floor, but it looked too new so I put it through the washing machine several times the day before yesterday so it was more like an old rag, which is how I wanted it to look. Now the bathrobe was frayed and flecked with little bobbles of fluff, and, to round off the effect, I spilled a cup of coffee I was drinking over my bust. The woman tactfully scrutinized me from head to toe, dwelling on the stains and dishevelled hair, and I was really lucky one of the police belonged to the female sex since we ladies take much more notice of the small details than the menfolk do. She seemed very on the ball and I trust she drew her own conclusions from my shabby appearance.
Her colleague, fortyish and with Paul Newman’s eyes, was the one in charge. He introduced himself very nicely, asked me if I was who I am and said he just had a few questions he wanted to ask. A routine enquiry, he added, smiling soothingly. I’d nothing to worry about. I adopted the astonished expression I’d been rehearsing for days in front of the mirror and invited them into the dining room.
As they followed me down the passage, I made sure I gave them the impression I was a frail, sickly old dear struggling to walk and draw breath. I exaggerated, because I’m pretty sprightly for my age and, thank God, I’m not in bad health, although I tried to imitate the way Carmeta walks, dragging my feet at the speed of a turtle, as if every bone in my body was aching. Both homed in on the sacks of cement, the tins of paint and workmen’s tools that are still in the passage, and asked me if I was having building work done. I told them the truth: that after all that rain, the kitchen ceiling had collapsed and it had been a real mess.
“If only you’d seen it …! You’d have thought a bomb had dropped!” I told them with a sigh. “And it was so lucky I was watching the TV in the dining room …!”
The young policewoman nodded sympathetically and said that was the drawback with top-floor flats, though an attic has lots of advantages because you get a terrace and plenty of light. “What’s more,” she added shyly, “with all the traffic there is in the Eixample, you don’t hear the noise from the cars or breathe in so many fumes.” I agreed and told her a bit about what the Eixample was like almost fifty years ago, when Andreu and I first came to live here.
Visibly on edge, her colleague interrupted and asked me if I’d heard anything from my son-in-law. I adopted my slightly senile expression again and said I hadn’t.
The policeman persisted. He wanted to know the last time I’d seen Marçal and if I’d spoken to him by phone. I told him as ingenuously as I could that I’d not heard from him for some time, and politely enquired why he was asking.
“He disappeared a week ago and his family think something untoward may have happened. That’s why we’re talking to everyone who knows him,” he replied softly. “I don’t suppose you know where he’s got to, do you?”
“Who?” I said, pretending to be in the early stages of Alzheimer’s.
“Your son-in-law.”
“Marçal?�
�
“Yes, Marçal.”
“Sorry … What was it you just asked me?”
Like those old people who really don’t cotton on, I changed the subject and asked them if they’d like a drink – a coffee, an infusion or something stronger. When they asked me if I knew that he and my little girl were negotiating a divorce and if I was aware my son-in-law had a restraining order in force because she’d reported him for physical abuse, I simply looked at the floor and shrugged my shoulders. Reluctantly, I confessed I suspected things weren’t going too well.
“But all married couples have problems … I didn’t want to harp on about theirs,” I said, adding, “Nowadays women don’t have the patience … In my time …”
I didn’t finish my sentence. There was no need. The young policewoman looked at me affectionately and gave one of those condescending smiles liberated young females of today reserve for us old wrinklies with antiquated ideas. Out of the corner of one eye, I registered that she’d had a French manicure and wore a wedding ring. To judge by her pink cheeks and smiley expression, the young woman must still be in the honeymoon period.
Before they could start grilling me about Marçal and his relationship with Marta again, I began to gabble on about stuff that was totally unrelated, playing the part of an old dear who lives by herself, has nobody to talk to and spends her day sitting on her sofa in front of the TV watching programmes she doesn’t understand. My grousing made them uneasy, and the man finally glanced at his watch and said they ought to be leaving. Their visit (you couldn’t really call it an interrogation) had lasted less than ten minutes. When they were saying goodbye, they repeated that I shouldn’t worry. That it was probably just a misunderstanding.
Marta, my little girl, will soon be thirty-six. I’m seventy-four, and it’s no secret that Andreu and I were getting on when I got pregnant with Marta. Nowadays it’s quite normal to have your first baby at forty, but it wasn’t in my day. If you didn’t have a bun in the oven before you turned thirty, people scowled at you, as if it was a sin not to have children. The kindest comment they’d make was that you weren’t up to it. If you were married and childless, you suddenly became defective.
Marta is an only child. As she was such a latecomer, the poor dear didn’t have a brother or sister. Apart from Carmeta and Ramon, who are kind of substitute aunt and uncle, my little girl doesn’t have any real ones, or cousins for that matter. From the day we buried her father, may he rest in peace, Marta’s only had Carmeta and me; you can hardly count Ramon, Carmeta’s husband, since he had his stroke. Carmen has to feed him with some sort of puree she buys at the chemists that she administers with a syringe through a rubber tube that goes in through his nose and down to his stomach, a torture that’s simply prolonging his agony because his doctors say he’ll never recover. They insisted to Carmeta that Ramon isn’t suffering, though we spend the whole blessed day with him and aren’t so sure about that.
Carmeta’s the same age as me, and, though I can’t complain about my health, she’s rather the worse for wear. A cancer she can’t see the back of. She and Ramon didn’t have children, and both doted on Marta like an aunt and uncle from the day she was born. My daughter loves them, and they love her. If it hadn’t been for his stroke, I’d cross my heart and swear Ramon would have rearranged my son-in-law’s face and things would have turned out differently.
A pity none of us was in the know a year ago.
We were completely in the dark.
Even though we sometimes said our little girl seemed to be behaving a bit strangely. Sluggishly. As if she were unhappy. But we all have our off days, don’t we?
Our little girl put on a brave front. Partly because she didn’t want us to worry, and partly because she was embarrassed to acknowledge that her husband beat her. If I’d never decided to buy some pastries and pay her a visit one day after accompanying Carmeta to her chemo session, I expect we’d still be none the wiser and it would be life as usual.
That morning, when Marta opened the door barricaded behind a pair of huge sunglasses, our alarm bells immediately started ringing. Something was amiss. She pretended she had conjunctivitis to justify the dark glasses indoors, but Carmeta, who’s a suspicious sort, didn’t swallow that and snatched them from her face. Our hearts missed several beats when we saw that black eye lurking under layers of make-up.
At first she denied it. Carmeta and I are no fools and applied the third degree, and she finally caved in. In floods of tears she confessed that her husband drank too much and beat her now and again. A punch, a slap, a shove … When he calmed down, he’d put it down to stress at work. He’d also say he would kill her if she ever told anyone.
I saw a bruise on my little girl’s left arm and told her to strip off. The poor thing couldn’t bring herself to say no and agreed, reluctantly. Then Carmeta and I burst into tears. Our darling Marta was black and blue all over. From that day on we never referred to him by his name again. My son-in-law became the Animal, the Son of a Bitch or the Bastard. We got weaving. We persuaded Marta to report him, and the three of us went to see a lawyer. Marta was afraid nobody would believe her and that the judge would take her child away, but the lawyer did a good job of reassuring her and, in the end, made a start on the paperwork. And it was true: with his executive suits and silk ties, the Bastard seemed like a normal person.
A cunt of a normal person who beat his wife and threatened to kill her.
And our little girl, quite naturally, was scared.
But now she had us on her side.
*
The Bastard went to live with his sister and disappeared from our lives for months. Marta, who’d been reduced to skin and bones by all the unpleasantness, even began to put on weight. Until one evening he appeared out of the blue at her place and said he was going to kill her.
It was only a matter of time.
Depending on his patience.
And Carmeta suddenly saw the light.
No well-intentioned law could protect Marta. If he put his mind to it, the Bastard would sooner or later do the evil deed. As he said, it was only a matter of time. A matter of waiting until one of us lowered her guard or the judge decided there were more serious cases to see to and that our little girl no longer needed protection. That she could manage on her own.
It’s not hard to intimidate someone. Or to kill them.
And, in the meantime, the Bastard would ruin her life.
Hers and everybody else’s.
It’s a piece of luck I have an attic flat and that it’s got a terrace. The woman mosso was right. Attics can be very inconvenient, but they have lots of advantages. And if you don’t agree, just ask the Bastard.
Andreu and I rented this flat on the Eixample just before we got married, and the only thing my husband insisted on when we were courting and looking for a flat was that it should have a small terrace. My parents didn’t have a terrace because we lived on the third floor, but when the weather was good we’d go up to the flat roof and enjoy the cool of evening and gossip with the neighbours. I’d go there with my friends in the summer. We’d put our swimsuits on, lay our beach towels on the red tiles and imitate the film stars in our magazines, listening to the radio and drinking fizzy lemonade or tepid Coca-Cola, pretending it was Martini. Then we’d have to fight off sunstroke with aspirins, water packs and vinegar, but it was worth it. When you’re young, there’s a solution to everything.
It’s not that my little terrace is any great shakes. All the same, twenty-two square metres are enough for a pine, a lemon and an orange tree, a magnolia, a decent-sized jasmine and a bougainvillea, not to mention the dozens of pots of roses, petunias, daisies and chrysanthemums I’ve put in every cranny. When Andreu and I set foot on it for the first time, I could hardly imagine how providential this little terrace would turn out to be.
Because I don’t know how I could have helped my little girl without it.
And I reckon that’s what a mother’s for: to be around to give a helping ha
nd to her children when they’ve got problems. Whether they like it or not.
It was Carmeta who came up with the solution. She’s always been very imaginative. The terrace and the kitchen that the downpour had ruined gave her the idea, and no sooner was it said than done. Neither of us was prepared to wait with arms folded while my little girl was left at the mercy of an obsolete legal system and a lunatic who wanted to bump her off. We had to do something, and do it quick, before we lost our nerve. As Carmeta said, a stitch in time saves nine.
I called the Bastard on his mobile a couple of weeks ago from a phone box and told him we needed to have a chat. I persuaded him by saying I had to tell him about a new development that would make Marta slow up on the divorce, and, as I knew he was short of cash because he was drinking a lot and had got the sack, I added that I wanted to give him a present of a weekend away with Marta. Three or four days in a good hotel with a swimming pool, all expenses paid, would help them make peace, I told him. My call and sudden interest in saving their marriage took him by surprise, but, as Carmeta had anticipated, the financial bait hooked him.
Early the next morning, Carmeta came to my flat carrying a sports bag. Her face looked haggard and she confessed she’d had a bad night. I told her I could ring the Bastard and give him an excuse if she’d rather leave it for another day, but she’d hear none of it. The tranquillizers she’d taken were beginning to take effect and she already felt slightly better, or so she said.
“What do you reckon? Should we have a little drop of something to put us in the mood?” I suggested hesitantly.
“No alcohol!” replied Carmeta, most professionally. “What we need are anti-stress pills. We’re far too nervy.”
Out of her bag, Carmeta took the antidepressants that the doctor had prescribed after telling her she had cancer, and offered me one. As she’s the expert when it comes to pills, I meekly swallowed it and said nothing. Out of the corner of my eye I noted that she took two. I went to the kitchen and made two cups of tea while Carmeta changed her clothes in the bedroom. She had brought an old tracksuit top and slippers. I was also wearing old clothes that would have to be thrown away.
The First Prehistoric Serial Killer and Other Stories Page 2